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Stratospheric sun screen, UK rail future, InSight touchdown and more: best of the week’s newsTim Fryer, technology editor Sun-reflecting chemicals could be ‘remarkably inexpensive’ way to reduce global warming NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Everything about this story oozes a disaster waiting to happen. Not the sort of disaster that involves the emergence of a new sort of skin […]

Book review: ‘How to Walk on Water and Climb Up Walls’Dramatic footage of animals in the wild, carefully edited to tell an engaging story, has become such a fundamental part of nature documentaries that broadcasters must fear they’re raising the bar ever higher when it comes to catching viewers’ attention. Somehow, though, slow-motion sequences of […]

Tax haven drives public sector’s smart city transformationThe fund, working with US tech giant Cisco, put up £100m of private finance on the premise that public authorities cannot raise enough money of their own from taxes to buy technology they need to modernise public services. But the fund is channelled through the Cayman Islands, an […]

Brexit chaos and uncertainty threatens UK industry, businesses warnIndependent analysis by the IPPR (Institute for Public Policy Research) has warned that the harder Brexit options pose a significant risk to UK environmental safeguards, with the possibility of scrapping more than 200 key EU laws putting protection of food, air and water safety at risk and […]

Facebook introduces political ad authorisation toolsThe rules are being introduced amid a storm of controversies regarding Facebook’s handling of user data (particularly the improper harvesting of user data to build political advertising tools), and the spread of politicised, state-backed misinformation and hate speech on the social network which have been credited with exerting some influence […]

Graphene’s lacklustre adoption rate blamed on silicon contaminationGraphene – an atom-thick hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms – is the strongest material ever tested, as well as having impressive electrical and thermal properties, also being flexible and transparent. Given these properties, engineers have described graphene as a “supermaterial” or “wonder material” and foretold a “graphene revolution” […]

Starbucks to block porn watched via in-store Wi-Fi from 2019“While it rarely occurs, the use of Starbucks public Wi-Fi to view illegal or egregious content is not, nor has it ever been, permitted,” Starbucks said in a statement. The company said it had “identified a solution” to block pornography, although it did not specify the […]